Friedrichstadt Leisure or the Chemical Tantalus

...in his book on insects, not to mention the works of others now. Some curious writers have also applied their minds to considering one insect or another, as the commentaries on Silkworms, Bees, Spiders, the Tarantula, and Francesco Redi’s Experiments teach, and what others have published on Cantharides Spanish fly/blister beetles.. In short, our age has discovered regarding Spiders and their webs something that almost surpasses human intellect: how the most glorious Louis XIV, King of France, used stockings made from them, which were superior to those made from silk. How this invention is analogous to the sayings of the Holy Scripture in Job chapter 8:14, Isaiah 59:5-6, Proverbs 30:29, I entrust to the masters of theology to search out. But these sayings can easily be reconciled with this more recent invention, which is that the webs of spiders have no use if they are neglected; but if the industry of man is added, then the brilliant minds that God has gifted with this acumen can accomplish something useful from them.

We pass to the Vegetable Kingdom, in which as many plants and plantlets exist, just so many are like seals, boasting the character of divine omnipotence; and the signatures of plants The "doctrine of signatures" was the belief that plants resembling human body parts could heal those parts., which the common people neglect. Regarding this, oh immortal God! the commonly called orthodox physicians (they are called this, who follow dogmatic-rational medicine; I, however, prefer to embrace Chemico-Empirical rational medicine, which rests on firmer foundations) are occupied, as if the shadow of them were the object, and as if God had gifted them with an admirable figure (though this, according to the common error of physicists, has no efficacy), with more elegant colors, and with an admirable taste, when in fact all these things are to be considered as vowels in an alphabet. Furthermore, they laugh at and treat as nothing the time of collection, even though in all natural things an increase and decrease of virtue is observed according to the constitution of time. The influence of the stars is ignored by them; they are content with a naked nomenclature of plants, and if they apply any industry, it consists in searching only the surface of the plants that are called "official," the farrago of which does not even express a thousandth part of the family. But who would believe that God created so many myriads of plants in vain, devoid of every fruit and every benefit to the human race? From this it also happens that not rarely charlatans, old wives, and other simpler people of the common sort cure those diseases which doctors, adorned with the doctoral tiara and walking with a swaying cloak, who are called the "lights of the world," leave to prognostics. Indeed, it is so with any...